Publications
Minority Business Success: Refocusing on the American Dream. Stanford University Press, 2011.
Although the U.S. is a big economy, it is rapidly becoming one of many able contestants in a highly competitive global business environment. The notion of American national competitive advantage has never been more important, because first jobs, then whole industries can migrate overseas, seemingly overnight. When this happens, the wealth-generating capacity of that industry departs our economy, too. Jobs disappear; revenue streams are lost; capital to reinvest dries up; and tax revenues vanish, leaving the country strapped for the cash it needs to upgrade its physical and intellectual infrastructure and to maintain the national standard of living, defense, security, and social services. It’s a downward spiral.
So America needs all its citizens making their best contributions to the country’s economic well-being. This book is about enabling the full participation of minorities in the U.S. economy. Minorities are well on their way to becoming the majority of our work force and our entrepreneurial economy. It’s well-established that small business is the biggest source of job creation and wealth generation in the U.S. economy, so priority needs to be given to supporting entrepreneurs. It’s also well-established that access to capital has always been more difficult for minorities and women. So we need to make it easier for small businesses to get the loans they need to grow their businesses—which will allow them to give out more in wages and spend more on purchases, thereby bolstering the local economy.
But increasing access to capital without making sure the money will generate long-term revenue streams amounts to “throwing money at the problem” and this country has squandered billions of dollars demonstrating how ineffective that tactic is. The emphasis needs to be on development of minority businesses, of which capitalization is just one element. Successful development involves a comprehensive, integrated set of interventions. Piecemeal solutions have never worked, and will never work. That’s why efforts need to be refocused and integrated.
This book explores what it means to develop minority businesses so that they take their necessary place in the U.S. economy. In past decades, advocates have created opportunities for minority businesses to compete for a small percentage of relatively-unimportant outsourcing. In many cases, this has amounted to little more than issuing a purchase order then hoping for the best. But this approach does not measure up to global best-in-class supply-management strategy, in which the central objective is to work with high-potential suppliers and help them get better—in other words, to develop them.
The book starts out showing how demographics are changing, traces the evolution of minority inclusion in the U.S. economy, and explains the consequences of not addressing the challenges posed by changing demographics. Next, it looks at what minority firms need to be doing to take their place in the economy, because they are the most important element of the solution. Then it examines how governments, corporations, and support organizations must refocus their efforts to foster minority inclusion in value chains. Finally, it offers ten specific recommendations that form the bedrock of a new paradigm for developing minority businesses—so that they can fully contribute to national competitive advantage.
Managing Strategic Relationships: The Key to Business Success, The Free Press, 2001.
Contrary to the gospel of a century of management thinkers, the primary job of the manager is no longer to plan, organize, direct, or control, asserts management expert Leonard Greenhalgh. Instead, he argues, today's successful managers are primarily negotiators who are judged on their ability to foster, coach, protect, and support collaborative relationships—and manage conflict—with peers, workers, bosses, suppliers, customers, regulators, competitors, and stakeholders.
In one of the most comprehensive analyses of business relationships ever written, Greenhalgh shows how relationships—not technology or "know-how"—are the foundation of the new extended enterprise. In immensely readable prose, he describes how companies have moved beyond adversarial relationships of command-and-control hierarchies to a new communal world in which internal networks of autonomous professionals and external networks of collaborating organizations compete against rival networks. In order to manage, managers must acquire a whole new set of negotiating skills, he argues. Traditional negotiating techniques promoted winning and self-interest, leaving a wake of bitterness and acrimony. Here Greenhalgh introduces for the first time a brilliant concept he calls "Commonwealth," which promotes ongoing relationships and the common interest. Using scores of detailed case studies and examples, he offers a set of cutting-edge tools managers can apply immediately to repair and improve relationships between people at all levels of responsibility, between groups, between organizations themselves, and between personalities involving gender differences.
Timely, stimulating, and powerful, Managing Strategic Relationships has been acclaimed as essential reading for every manager who hopes to succeed in the organization of today.
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For a full list of Professor Greenhalgh's publications, please download his CV from the Curriculum Vitae page
